My sleep schedule is FUBAR

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m not a good sleeper.

I tend towards being nocturnal. Generally this isn’t such a big deal - my job requires me to work 8-5ish so I’m forced to maintain “adult” hours.

:rolleyes:

Over the Christmas break, I did a bad thing. I let my nocturnal impulses run wild. My first day off I got really into a game of Sins of a Solar Empire and ended up staying up until 7 AM.

7 AM.

Nothing is worse than thinking “man, I should probably get to bed” and then realizing that it’s starting to get light outside. Damnable sun.

I slept that day from about 7 AM until 3 PM. This pretty much continued for a week and a half. A few days I saw only about two hours of sunlight. Hooray for winter!

I had to work this week Monday and Tuesday. Sunday night I couldn’t sleep of course. I think I finally got to sleep around 5 AM. Waking up at 7:30 AM was pretty rough but I managed. Got into work without issue, thought “Thank God, at least I’ll fall asleep easy tonight.”

As if.

Monday night was even worse. Didn’t get to sleep until about 5:30 AM. This time, a 7:30 wakeup was murder. After about 4 hours of sleep in the last 48, I was in a bad way. I got nothing done at work today - I was going to stick it out, then it struck me that I didn’t feel safe working in the lab in such a haze. The managers are still on vacation, so I didn’t go back after lunch. Drove home, passed out. Slept from about 1 PM to 7 PM.

Fail.

Now it’s about 3:30 in the morning. I’m wide awake. I have tomorrow and Thursday off. I’m wondering how on earth I’m ever going to get back to a normal schedule - especially since if I want to, I can take a vacation day on Friday.

And I always thought that once I was out of college and all grown up a normal sleep schedule would come naturally. Silly me.

2

Rest assurred (ha, no pun intended ;)) you are not alone. This winter break has been insane, with me sick as a dog for 8 days and sleeping VERY late, napping off and on, the kids not getting to bed at anything close to a reasonable hour and hence, sleeping ridiculously late as a result, sigh…

They go back to school Monday, and I am TRYING to get us all back on a more sane schedule. (me, currently unemployed, but I still usually get up early to get them off to school…gonna hurt:eek:)

We all tend to be night owls (hell, it’s almost 3 am and here I am…seldom down before that, but I can do that and be up by 10 or 11…my teen son will sleep until 2pm if he goes down at 3am)

Now that I am finally feeling almost fully recovered from my upper respiratory infection from hell, I am going to start enforcing bedtime again (did so tonight, more or less, sort of gradually pushing it back to normal)

Geez, it’s gonna be a bitch, though. Esp. with no sun to speak of here this time of year.

And yeah, I’ve done that OMG it’s 7 am thing a few times. LOL. Luckily, I was usually able to just go and sleep in a bit late. Although back when I did a paper route, the holidays were the worst…Christmas, New Years, and I’d realize, um, no point in going to bed NOW, I might as well just stay up and keep drinking until 3am, when I have to go do my job and then sleep in extra late. :smiley:

3

Interesting. I also had an upper respiratory virus. To quote Achewood, I was “expectorating one green egg yolk from my lungs every half hour.” Luckily I seem to be getting over that.

Yep, I also suffer from the “well, I might as well drink” disease.

“Hey! I’m having a great time reading the SDMB! But you know what would make it more interesting? A stiff drink!”

4

Working the graveyard shift has been a challenge for me now that I am older. A nurse suggested melatonin and Benedryl. I take 6mg of mel and 1 ben. Takes me 20 min to fall asleep but it works (and I am a die hard insomniac). i used to take a prescription med to help me but it made me grumpy and no matter how much I did sleep - it wasnt a good sleep. Now, I can go 6-9 hrs and feel completely rested.

Of course, it helps if you are disciplined enough to shut off the games/tv and actually go to bed. I use this time (20 min) to meditate.

5

Aye, there’s the rub.

6

A good trick I have used for myself (also a night owl that was actually on night shift for several years but recently went back to days) is to just stay up all day. If the sun is up, so am I. It really sucks until you pass 24 hours, then it’s a breeze.

If you stay up all day and can make it until about 8-ish the next evening, you should be able to get your clock flipped back over.

Good luck!

7

Could be delayed sleep phase syndrome.

8

I feel your pain. I need about 12 hours of sleep and having a lack of things to get up for and insomnia has shifted my sleeping schedule to about 4 AM - 4 PM. Now you know why I never post before noon.

9

My sleep/wake schedule is out of whack too. Seems like the harder I try to fix it, the worse it becomes. I’ve got things to do early in the day tomorrow, but then I think I’m going to attempt to stay up for 24+ hours, and get it back to normal.

With my luck, I’ll just end up making it worse. :wink:

10

Ugh, this has happened to me before, too. A couple of years ago, I took a red-eye flight from Las Vegas to Boston and fell asleep when I got home. Big mistake. Sleeping that day from 9 am to 5 pm screwed up my sleep schedule for almost a month (thank God I was a full-time grad student and on winter break at the time, and didn’t have to work). I’d sleep every “night” from about 6 am to 2 pm, which meant I’d see the sun for a maximum of three hours if I could make it outside before sunset. It made me a little crazy.

Yesterday I took the same flight from Las Vegas and forced myself to stay awake until late last night, but this morning I woke up at noon. Hopefully, I can train myself back to my normal sleep schedule. I’d never thought I’d say this, but now I’m glad I’m unemployed (not for long fingers crossed) so I don’t have to get up for work on Thursday.

11

If it were up to me, I’d be going to bed at 5-6am, if not later, so I feel your pain. 8 hours just isn’t enough when I sleep midnight to 8am, but is more than enough 5am-1pm. So normal hours leave me sleeping more, feeling less rested, and just generally annoyed at losing my most productive hours. And of course irritable - tired in the morning, tired in the afternoon, exhausted in the evening, then hyperactive from 10pm onwards.

I fight it, but it is an uphill battle. One night awake can take weeks to rectify, if I even want to. The only advice I can give is try to get as much sun as possible. Get outside, see the sky. It helps, a little.

12

Holy shit - this is me!! Finally I know what’s wrong with me. Thanks for this link, I will talk to my doctor about it.

13

Tylenol PM. It’s the only thing that gets me to sleep before 3AM on those terrible days that I have to be to work before noon.

14

My sleep schedule has been completely FUBAR-ed as well since just before Christmas. I got a bad stomach bug and spent 3am-7am, four nights in a row, on the toilet. This changed my sleep schedule from 3am-10am to 7am to 2pm.

New Year’s eve has only served to screw up my schedule even more because I got home this morning at 9am and slept from 10am to 4pm. I’m going to have to try to sleep tonight or I’ll never get anything done during daylight hours :smack:.